Lessons From Three Product Leaders Living in the Future

This is the next episode in a series on what product management becomes when the AI hype meets real constraints. I sat down with three CPOs living about a year ahead of the rest of us: Sharmeen Chapp, Midjourney's first-ever product hire; Jiaona Zhang (JZ), CPO at Laurel; and Henrik Berggren, who runs product and design at Mutiny. Their teams are tiny on purpose, yet these are companies with years of history, paying customers, and enterprise contracts—not the frictionless blank slates that "AI-native" suggests. We get into who should actually be building, how customer signal should move through a company, and how each of them installed an AI-first operating system without tipping into theater.

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Key topics:

• What never changes in PM

• Laurel's "captain" model: everyone is a builder

• Zoning the codebase like a garden so everyone can build safely

• Making the whole company understand the customer

• The AI Operations team: pairing hackers with leaders

• Treating the AI transformation as a product, with employees as the users

• Moving at "Cheetah speed": sprint when the tools jump, then rest

• Current PMs are managing a fleet, not an empire

• Why the strongest leaders are going hands-on now